Not guilty.

Hey!: come see Ben Lerner and Javier Huerta read tomorrow (Tuesday, Apr. 25) in the Holloway Series: 7 p.m., Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler)

In discussing the finer points of last week's gender/sex discussion, Noah had this insight: "Mommy is daddy and I am daddy and you are daddy too."

Wow. For those of you not already in The Know(tm), I've just discovered that the Tate Gallery, which has some of the best web curating I've yet come across, in addition to allowing walk-through tours of exhibitions, webcasts all of its symposia and artist talks.

Read an excerpt from the soon-to-be published Hashish writings of Benjamin. If only I'd read that stuff at 17 instead of Terence McKenna's space-aliens-in-the-magical-mushrooms gibberish, who knows where I'd be now.

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Probably here anyway, probably a day almost exactly like this one-- reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude, writing an essay on Jeff Wall and Benjamin, and surfeited by news sources (all bad, all meanings of this) such that the melting of the polar ice caps and an economy based increasingly on churning liquidity and speculation on speculation, combine, by both displacement and condensation, in the entirely banal phrase: trying to keep afloat.


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Here's one for the poetry wars: "All the elements of corruption and exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative regimes of production: destroying them in words is as urgent as doing so in deeds. . . Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real reappropriation of knowledge." (Multitude, 404)

Write your poems; you too can experience "the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist." (Empire, 413)

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I'm going to pretend I believe that words are as urgent as deeds and keep at the essays and research. Meanwhile, if anybody wants to do something. . . Please, please, be my guest.

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I like Jane's remarks about (the) soul as surplus value. I used to think the unconscious was the shoebox full of unopened mail I kept in the closet.

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Somebody please post a YouTube video of Anne Boyer kicking Jim Behrle's ass at the Flarf Festival.

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I might be scarce until I finish up classes mid-May. But I'll be listening.

I don't have much time to post. But I did want to say that I am glad that all the women-bloggers, and feminist man-bloggers, are speaking up. I hope everyone takes note: here, here, here, here.

I don't roam very far afield, blog-wise, but I don't buy the whole essentialist women are more visual hypothesis (and I find Stephanie's claim that this has to do with the treatment of women-bloggers as objects of a privileged male gaze pretty chilling) Whether female-bloggers are more apt to employ a non-normative ecriture feminine than male bloggers are apt to exercise whatever kinds of non-normative writing options are theirs, I don't know. (I resist it now, but I could be convinced otherwise).

But isn't blog-topia's favorite sexual harasser and homophobe also one of the most imagistic?